osmosis as a research tool

Available fictional plots, together with their obliging characters, are illimitable, even to the most cloistered individual writer.  That trite but infinite number of monkeys banging away on that even triter but equally infinite number of typewriters might have to labor away till infinity to use up the material available to any of us in our surrounding spheres of  reality combined with our innerspace imaginativeness.

Nevertheless, most of us  seek the path to easiest access. We write what we know. My wife ran a  rehabilitation methodone clinic for quite some time. Her discoveries re: human nature at this facility added seasoning to many a mealtime conversation. Is it any wonder that I chose to make the protagonist of one of my novels (magic realism) a doctor running a methodone clinic in San Francisco, CA (the city where I grew up)? With a ticket to travel the multiverse for material, I chose to create from bits that  lay about in my own backyard. 

Though I  never tried narcotics, other than a pre-operative injection a couple of times,  I absorbed enough re: the addict's tragic and unending craving for opiates to write a poem about it. Though movies, TV, and  reading contributed,  my simulated feelings grew mostly from my wife's antecdotes--things addicts told her, together with what she actually witnessed. And for whatever reason, my subconscious contrived this fictive truth:

            The Kiss             

Midst nod,            

my musing moment swells           

beyond its bracketing millennia,           

burgeoning my delirious bliss,           

protracted by a deity's call,            

ending with her egress.

One lone heart, my own, ecstatic,           

pulsing in this chasmic surge,            

bounding on a boundless length,           

temporal tightrope, of which            

but an infinitesimal segment            

had been mine to dance along.

In apogee, my spirit soars           

above the cosmos all.           

From me, time traces for and aft           

 a loop that's nadir-joined;           

a finite luminous ring of which            

the past, today, tomorrows fuse,           

candescent in continuum. 

"Disrupt that ring," I hear you cry,            

"Let elastic stretch contract;           

rid the warp, and make the abyss collapse."           

So be it!  So be it!  Amen. Amen.           

But this, undone, re-forms anon:           

there's magic in                                      

                the poppy's kiss. 

                                       Dennis Shay